Michigan great defends Big Ten decision
Howard praises league for putting health first
Big Ten Conference commissioner Kevin Warren isn’t a popular man in many places as the reality of a season without football sets in at University Park, Pa., and all over the conference. Warren has taken the shots from pundits all over America since the league announced that the 2020 season would not happen in the fall.
Parents are protesting against the decision. Coaches, including Penn State coach James Franklin, openly have challenged Warren. The Pac-12 postponed its season on the same day. Warren’s counterpart Larry Scott hasn’t had a school in that league threaten to play unsanctioned like Nebraska did to Warren.
Making a historic decision is often a lonely place. Warren is in that spot with few allies. While Warren doesn’t have a lot of people speaking on his behalf, there is at least one in former Michigan star and Super Bowl MVP Desmond Howard, currently a rising media star at ESPN.
The stark difference in the persecution criticism that Warren is receiving compared to the silence from other conferences that have postponed caused Howard to speak up.
“None of this would’ve happened if [longtime former commissioner] Jim Delaney was still sitting in the seat as the man in charge,” Howard told the Post-Gazette. “This is not a Kevin Warren decision. By job title, he has to take the arrows and fall on the sword, so to speak. But you don’t get all of this with Jim Delaney in charge. You don’t have Scott Frost as the head coach of Nebraska coming out against Delaney before the decision is made.
“If Scott would’ve tried that with Delaney, he would’ve gotten a stern phone call within minutes. A lot of people are taking Kevin’s kindness for weakness.”
Howard is bothered by the lack of transparency from the conference presidents and chancellors. An example of what Howard sees as a lack of support for Warren happened on Monday at Penn State.
Athletic director Sandy Barbour spoke to reporters for the first time since the season was postponed. A reporter asked how president Eric Barron voted. Barbour’s answer was as confounding as it was succinct.
“It’s unclear whether there was ever a vote or not,” Barbour said. “Nobody has ever told me there was. I don’t know whether there was a vote by the chancellors and presidents.”
Howard understands that Warren has to be the voice. But he also believes that presidents and chancellors should have to answer for their decisions.
“How can Sandy come out and say she didn’t know if there was a vote?” Howard said. “The athletic director reports directly to the president. All she had to do was make a phone call.”
Warren confirmed that a vote was taken in a letter posted to the Big Ten website on Wednesday.
“The vote by the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors was overwhelmingly in support of postponing fall sports and will not be revisited,” Warren said in the letter.
Howard is upset that he won’t get to watch Big Ten football, but he respects Warren and the choice.
“It is tough for everybody. I talk about college football for a living,” Howard said. “It hurts to see the conference that means so to me and that I played in not have a season. It is not something they took lightly. You hear pundits talk about how much money these conferences make and how money hungry they are. They always say that it is about money.
“But, to me, it’s refreshing to see a conference say that the risks are too high.”
Iowa cuts sports
Four sports that had spanned a combined 328 years at the University of Iowa were trimmed Friday, cut from another athletics budget ailing from the effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic. In an open letter, the university president and athletic director of a program in an especially stormy year announced the end of the men’s gymnastics, men’s and women’s swimming and men’s tennis programs at the end of the 2020-21 academic year. It signaled the end of programs that had begun, respectively, in 1922, 1917, 1974 and 1939. It happened on the same day some Big Ten football parents, including those of some Iowa players, marched at the Big Ten headquarters in Rosemont, Ill., hoping to restore autumn football.